Sapienza: Pushed out?
If you’re watching the race for alderman in Ward 5, you’d need a split screen TV to follow Jason Bonilla’s campaign. Incumbent Alderman Tony Sapienza is retiring the seat after decade. Two years ago, he was nearly defeated by Kathleen Paquette, a newcomer to city politics. While Sapienza was rumored to be stepping down, Bonilla made it known he was going to run well before Sapienza made it official. Some felt as if Bonilla was trying to force Sapienza out of the race.
In a telltale sign he didn’t want his radical left progressive activism known to everyday voters, Bonilla deleted his account on X (formerly Twitter) shortly before making his run for office official.
Though Bonilla is in his second term on the Board of School Committee, he’s only been elected once. He was appointed to the position following Jeremy Dobson’s resignation. In 2023, he was elected with about a 100 votes over a candidate who became unable to campaign for personal and professional reasons.
On the school board, Bonilla has played the race/ethnicity victim card often, pushing or fighting policies that affected people “who look like me,” which is interesting since he looks like a White guy. He supported de-leveling high school classes and eliminating prerequisite requirements for Advanced Placement classes, claiming that grouping students by ability was discriminatory. He also pushed policies that eliminated penalties for chronic absenteeism, again claiming they were discriminatory, particularly against Latinos. Manchester now has one of the lowest attendance rates in the state.
Racist, sexist wheel
When parents raised concerns over the use of the anti-White, anti-male Wheel of Power and Privilege in a classroom at McLaughlin Middle School, Bonilla defended its use.
He supports the policy that enables the schools to socially transition children from one sex to the other without parental notification. If parents ask about their children’s behavior in school, the policy requires all staff to withhold the truth from parents unless the children, including those in elementary school, consent. The policy allows children who “identify” as the other sex, or something else, to use whatever bathroom or locker room, play on whatever sports team, or attend any health class based on how they identify, not based on what they are biologically.
In 2023, when state legislators attempted to pass a Parental Bill of Rights to stop this radical transgenderism ideology that’s taken hold in our schools by preventing school districts from withholding this information from parents, Bonilla signed a letter as the Ward 5 school board member opposing the bill, saying it “singles out transgender students…” and arguing that parents would “kick” their children out of their homes “just for being who they are.”
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When the school district sent a letter home telling parents it would not allow federal law enforcement into our school buildings because it “valued diversity” and “privacy,” Bonilla supported the administration.
As the campaign for alderman has worn on, Bonilla has told people he supports the police, a critical issue in a ward that has been battered by crime. But does he?
Paquette: Fought to change cashless bail law
A review of his campaign Web site shows only one mention of the police. It said nothing about fighting crime. It did say he wanted to “contribute to making strong connections with the Manchester Fire, Police, and Health Departments, along with local recovery centers and other vital community partners” and “continu[e]to facilitate an integrated network and ecosystem between us all.”
Neither crime nor the police are mentioned on his campaign Facebook page.
Kathy Paquette, an actual victim of violent crime, is very focused on the crime issues in the ward and city. As a state rep., she serves on the Criminal Justice Committee, where she has distinguished herself on key matters affecting the city, including fixing the state’s ridiculous “no cash bail” law. Because of that law, almost 30% of all criminals released in Manchester, including those arrested for violent offenses, went on to commit multiple other crimes, some of which were very violent. Paquette played a key role in passing the legislation that started to fix this disaster. Bonilla was no where to be found in these efforts. Like virtually every Democrat in the legislature, Bonilla supports releasing criminals without bail, leaving them to reoffend at will, the police powerless to stop them because the system wouldn’t hold them until trial.
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During the “Summer of Love” riots that burned cities all over the country, Bonilla was in the “Defund the Police” camp, protesting against the “police state” in Boston. Those protests accused police departments across the country, including here in Manchester, of being “systemically racist” and demanding that they stop policing “communities of color,” despite polls in those communities showing the overwhelming majority of the residents wanted more policing, not less.
Bonilla: Black Lives Matter
Bonilla is also a hard core supporter of Black Lives Matter, which fueled those riots that devastated cities from coast to coast, extorting money from companies across the country and peddling actual Marxist ideology openly on its Web site (since removed, it advocated for the breakup of the “nuclear family”), while its leaders spent millions on mansions in gated communities.
In 2023, Bonilla received the “Progressive of the Year” award from the NH Young Democrats.
In August, he was endorsed by Run For Something 2025, a radical leftist organization dedicated to “recruiting and supporting young progressives.”
In May, he was a featured speaker at the “No Kings” rally in Concord. The most recent rally was funded by approximately $300 million from the likes of billionaire George Soros and his Open Society Fund, which are under investigation for funding acts of political and other violence across the country. The rallies, attended mostly by aging White liberal “Baby Boomers” protested President Donald Trump’s efforts to remove illegal aliens who have committed crimes from our country. As seen in the photo atop this article, he’s no stranger to protests against the removal of criminal illegal aliens.
Bonilla: Award winning progressive. Click to enlarge
Bonilla portrays himself as someone who wants representation for under represented communities of color. Indeed, he’s the Program Director for the Equity Leaders Fellowship, which is curiously absent from his Web site. If his job description is accurate (see screenshot), why isn’t he or his organization supporting the campaigns of school board member Carlos Gonzalez (R-Ward 12), a Dominican immigrant, or aldermanic candidate Robert Rivera (R-Ward 10) and school board candidate Cali Rojas (R-Ward 3), who are also Latino? The answer is they’re not progressives; they don’t adhere to Bonilla’s woke orthodoxy which portrays “people like him” as victims of a racist White society to gain power. In public presentations before the board, Rojas has challenged its woke actions, calling for the board to deal with students as individuals based on merit, not labeled groups. Rivera spoke about this in this interview with Girard at Large. We can’t recommend it enough.
Bonilla job description: Click to enlarge
Jason Bonilla is a very personable, likable guy. Always has a big smile and, yes, he will talk to people he disagrees with, as he has with me. That said, he is possessed of a dangerous ideology, the furtherance of which will be his top, if not only priority. A good example of this was his siding with school district’s push to shut down Henry Wilson Elementary School.
According to a 2021 facilities study, bringing Wilson up to standard would have cost $3.5 million. The cost for doing the same at Beech St. Elementary School was approximately $3.2 million. Both are schools in Ward 5 and Wilson was the last school left in the city to which the vast majority of families could walk; not an unimportant matter given the poverty of its families and the transportation challenges it presents.
Instead of fighting to upgrade Wilson for its parents and neighborhood, Bonilla backed closing Wilson and demolishing Beech St. to build a new Beech St. School on Sheridan Emmit Park. Because the populations of the two schools are “like him,” with including high percentages of refugees and immigrants, for Bonilla, it was a matter of “equity” and nothing says “equity” like spending more than ten times the money that needs to be spent to properly address an issue. It’s a way to “get something” for “historically underserved and under represented” communities.
Bonilla: Speaking at No Kings rally in Concord
When all is said and done, taxpayers will shell out over $78 million that didn’t need to be spent for a school that didn’t need to be built to make families dependent on buses to transport their kids and, if Bonilla gets his way, turn Wilson into government subsidized low income housing, which will only add to the area’s density and poverty, which leads to more crime and a diminished quality of life. This is what “progressive” politicians do, even those with a friendly smile and cheery disposition.
One more thing. Given Bonilla’s protesting on behalf of he IBEW and his endorsements by the AFL-CIO and Local 856 (probably because he opposes the tax cap) and the MEA teachers union (definitely because he’ll vote to override the tax cap to spend far more on schools) and you have to wonder, between pushing his radical ideology on the city and returning the favor of his union masters, where do the actual residents of Ward 5 fit in–other than to give him a platform for his own radical purposes?
Click here to learn more about Paquette’s campaign for alderman in Ward 5. Whether it’s public safety, zoning, taxes and spending or a variety of other issues, it will demonstrate a marked contrast between focused on an agenda and another focused on the well being of the people she seeks to represent. Everybody loves a conman until they realize they’ve been conned. Don’t be fooled by the smiling face and fancy signs. Bonilla is a hard core leftist and he’s demonstrated that time and again. It’s who he is.
